The Appraisal Institute says "Zestimates suck, " No, actually they are a lot smarter than that. Thomas A. Thomson, PhD, Daniel R. Hollas, PhD, Ronald C. Rutherford, PhD did the study reported in Appraisal Institute - Zillow’s Estimates of Single-Family Housing Values and they say Zestimates (an AVM or Automated Valuation Model) are inacccurate.
Did you read all 7 pages before commenting that you could have told them Zestimates are inaccurate? I skimmed it. I can use it to get to sleep tonight.
The study said Zillow's Zestimates are not accurate. The Appraisal Institute Study came out last week and according to a blog post on Matrix, by Jonathan Miller Appraisal Journal Study Cites Flaws In Zillow AVM the report says Zillow is less accurate than your average homeowner?
Actually the Appraisal Institute says:
" The use of Zillow.com to provide an estimate of housing value does not appear to be as accurate as owners’ estimates of value that several studies have documented. For example, Kiel and Zabel find that, on average, homeowners overestimate the value of their homes by 5.1% and new owners overvalue their homes by approximately 8.4%."
Zillow's response... John Cook writes: Zillow disputes academic study which questions Zestimates
Zillow says it is old news? Old data... The Appraisal Institute's academics are looking at old data... they used 2006 and 2007 (Zillow was born in early February 2006, I believe.)
Have Zillows powers of Zestimation improved since 2007?
On Matrix Miller writes about the historic anti Zestimate bias in the real estate industry among agents and appraisers for different reasons. Also he says of Zillow "Perhaps they were more guilty of overhyping the reliability of their “Zestimates” in the early days by presenting value estimates precisely down to the dollar. But hey, it was cool to see how much your neighbor’s house was worth."
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